Poem: Flesh Of Stone

The darkness surrounding the land slowly began to evaporate, as the sun revealed itself to the earth, smiling with its passive face of light at the motion of life that continued on before it. An eternity I have sat, contemplating, waiting, wondering what wonders I have missed. Ever since the heartless angel from above tainted my very soul with the cold, ghoul touch of stone, people have gone by me in total ignorance of my being. They see my outer shell, but fail to see my inner despair.

Inside a square of passive greenery, I sit, eyes rolled to the heavens in a pleading stare, hoping that sympathy should float my way and release me from my immortality, release me from my eternal past, separate me from the living dreams which have halted the blood of my motionless being.
My body is my now my prison, my life is a mere illusion, an image of what I wished it to be. Everyday my solid eyes witness the rise and fall of the sun, the creeping movement of the distant dissipating clouds. Hail and rain bounce off my solid, cold complexion, while sunshine reflects off my brow.

If I am to live in this lingering Limbo, would God have mercy and send searing showers to erode my solid, moulded shape into a flurry of fragments, to scatter about the land and enable me to see its wonders for the first time since the birth of my un-ageing life? Or would he send a man, chisel in hand, to carve my being into a shape more tolerable and endurable towards the hardship? Do I wish to be shaped as a bird?
A boar? Do I have the capability to wish at all?

There will be no end to this everlasting torture. This cursed creature, with head locked in upward slant, is doomed to stare the same vision until the end of time.

Time.

Time is my only possession, my one ally. Time has preserved my sanity, yet it fuels my hatred for myself. And so I sit, like a Chapel Gargoyle, with its rooftop stare, remaining alone, rooted to the rafters of hell, doomed to live my life of discoloured memories.

I can do nothing but wait and wonder, wait while I wither, live my life isolated inside my shell. There is no escape from myself.
There is no escape from my flesh of stone.

Written by Andrew Duffy,
1st March 1998